World in Conflict launches

World in Conflict launched on the 18th and while I’ve been really excited about the game but I held off on pre-ordering it due to my experience on getting burned with Command and Conquer 3. Based on my investigation, I have to say that the number of people who have appeared to buy the game and play it online is less than encouraging. Heading over to Massgate, the battle.net of Massive Entertainment you can see the number of players that have currently played the game online by scrolling through the ladder to the end. As of today, the number of players who own the game and have played online is roughly 5,200. ** edit(9/24): its now over 28,000 **

Call me jaded but after playing games like Counter-strike, Starcraft and World of Warcraft this number seems a little low for a game that got 93% in PC Gamer.When I played Command and Conquer 3 the game basically died when the number of active ladder players shrunk to below 10,000 due to the 1vs1 nature of the ladder. If 5-10% of the playerbase is online at any given time the number of people to play against is 260-520. The 5-10% of 5200 number is reinforced by going online with the demo and looking at the server list where I counted 360 people at 8am.

Don’t get me wrong I really want to play this game, I think its fun and its probably the perfect blend of action and strategy. I enjoyed the demo a lot but if the player base isn’t there to play against then I don’t really have much interest in investing money on the game. If the game doesn’t take off Massive should think about making the game free to play online with limited graphics so that the player base increases and makes the value added features of the game more appealing.

The multi-player aspect to the game appeals to me and I really want to try out the tug of war mode. Once you get used to the camera and can find a few people that know how to work together the game is a blast. If the user base increases to around 50,000-100,000 I will probably pickup the game but I don’t feel like paying 50 bucks to play on less than 20 active servers.

Tags: | Games | multiplayer | world in conflict

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